Last summer my brother and I drove from Estes Park over the Rocky Mountains to Grand Lake. The highway follows ridges, rising ever higher until it reaches over 12,000 feet. The views are awe-inspiring. Long’s Peak and the rest of the Front Range lie on the left, the Mummy Range is on the right.
Highway engineers are no dummies, they followed the Ute Trail much of the way. Utes walked over the range generations ago and found — with the help of deer, elk and running water — a good way to make the journey. Part of the Ute Trail is still in use by the National Park and can be hiked from the ridge top to Moraine Park.
Hikers are almost always driven to the trail head to begin the seven-mile, all downhill, jaunt.
A few miles on, the highway also begins to descend. Tourists often stop at Poudre Lake, which marks the top of the divide. Water flows from the lake both east and west.
As one nears the valley leading to Grand Lake and the village there, the pine forest becomes more and more marred with dead trees. There are dead trees among the live ones all along, but the percentage of dead trees seems to grow as one goes west.
Close to Grand Lake the kill seems total. Government workers have cut trees and stacked them, teepee like, along the right of way. They can’t cut them all, but cut enough to leave 100 feet or more of cleared land. New trees will be planted there, we assumed, when the beetles are gone. In the meantime, removing the dead trees along the highway is being done to reduce the fuel available for fires.
And that’s the point of this piece. The pine bark beetles that are killing pine trees over a huge swath of the country can be killed themselves with Carbaryl spray. Carbaryl is an insecticide sold as Sevin. It kills chiggers, too. And mosquitoes. If you have a pine tree in your yard, spray it with Sevin. Ask an Extension expert how to do it most effectively.
SO WHY isn’t the government spraying to prevent this havoc?
Reason number one is that it costs money. The Department of the Interior, like every other part of the government, is short of cash. A little spraying is being done in Rocky Mountain National Park. Trees in campgrounds and around visitor centers are being treated and those that have been sprayed have lived. Sevin works.
The anti-beetle program in RMNP in the Estes Park area is limited to 7,000 trees. The number of threatened — or already dead — trees must be in the millions.
This set of facts should result in an all-out job program. What better way to put thousands of unemployed young men and women to work? What better way to stimulate the insecticide, sprayer, truck, face-mask, and jeans industries than to mobilize a pine bark beetle assault army and order it to attack?
Need convincing? Drive from Estes Park to Grand Lake and see for yourself.
— Emerson Lynn, Jr.
